(24 Sept 2025) How are people actually using ChatGPT? Drawing on a dataset of more than 1 million conversations between users and ChatGPT, this report gives us a panoramic view into the sorts of prompts people put forward to generative AI. Much of the discussion around AI literacy has hinged on possible or presumed usages of AI in a higher ed context, and though this report doesn’t examine college students as a specific sample group, it nonetheless offers some interesting insights into the actual deployment of this technology.
One of the key takeaways from this report is that, though work-related usages of ChatGPT continue to grow, they are wildly outpaced by nonwork-related usages, which have grown from 53 to 73 percent of all ChatGPT messages (p. 2). This finding raises two important questions: Given its ostensible economic promises, why isn’t work-related usage growing faster, and why is nonwork usage growing so much?
Given the prized role of writing in educational environments, many academics might assume that when people use ChatGPT “for writing,” they’re using it specifically to generate new text from scratch—hence, the return of blue books. What this report finds, however, is that about two-thirds of all writing tasks have ChatGPT modify existing text, e.g., editing it for errors, adjusting the tone, or offering critiques, rather than generating new text (pp. 14, 16).
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